Books

January 21: Nineteen-year-old Ernest Hemingway returned to the United States on this day in 1919, heading home to recuperate from wounds suffered on the Italian Front. He would receive another war wound six weeks later, when a Dear John letter arrived ...

January 20: The Iran Hostage Crisis ended on this day in 1981, and Terry Waite's captivity began on this day in 1987. Waite tells his own, emotional story in Taken in Trust; Mark Bowden's Guests of the Ayatollah (2006) is the definitive chronicle of th...

January 19: Julian Barnes was born on this day in 1946. When in his mid-thirties Barnes was featured in Granta magazine's "Best of Young British Fiction" issue. Flaubert's Parrot was published the very next year, and some two dozen books have followed,...

January 18: Edward Bulwer-Lytton died on this day in 1873, and Rudyard Kipling died on this day in 1936. To some of his contemporaries, Kipling was a target for parody; Bulwer-Lytton's "It was a dark and stormy night...," the rambling wreck of a first ...

January 17: Mark Twain published "The Boy's Ambition" in the Atlantic Monthly on this day in 1875. Later collected in book form as Life on the Mississippi, this was the first installment in his "Old Times on the Mississippi" series. As the magazine ser...

January 16: William Kennedy was born on this day in 1928 in Albany, New York. Kennedy's Albany Cycle, now eight novels long, reflects his long and loving relationship with his hometown: "I once thought I loathed the city, left it without a sigh and tho...

January 14: Edward Bellamy's Looking Backward: 2000-1887 was published on this day in 1888. The utopian fantasy became the bestselling book of the next decade, and the third-bestselling book of the nineteenth century. Over 150 Bellamy Clubs were formed...

January 13: Carolyn Heilbrun was born on this day in 1926. As a professor of English at Columbia, Heilbrun wrote a number of influential feminist studies; as "Amanda Cross," she wrote the Kate Fansler mysteries, her heroine a feminist-minded English pr...

January 12: Bob Kaufman died on this day in 1986, and A. D. Winans was born on this day in 1936. The two Beat poets were friends, though the older Kaufman was a legend on the San Francisco poetry scene by the time Winans met him there: "…his lif...

January 11: President Theodore Roosevelt declared the Grand Canyon a national monument on this day in 1908. Roosevelt designated seventeen other national monuments during his time in office, thereby becoming the White House's Wilderness Warrior -- to b...

January 10: Robinson Jeffers was born on this day in 1887. Jeffers lived on and often wrote about the California coast, and is regarded by many as "the father of environmental poetry." His Tor House in Carmel is today a popular stop for both literary t...

January 9: On this day in 1324 Marco Polo died in Venice, aged seventy. The adventurer's Travels of Marco Polo, dictated several years after his return from decades in the land of Kublai Khan, became an influential book in Renaissance Europe, though so...